I really enjoyed listening to Frasier Speirs—Head of Computing and IT at Cedars School of Excellence in Greenock, Scotland—on Mac Power Users. Especially this:

We looked at at the suite of office applications that people use, and we recognized that word processing was on the way out… We thought it was a skill that didn’t have a big future. Because if you think about it,… word [processing] is the act of laying out text to print on a piece of paper. The whole concept of the application is based around a piece of paper. At the end of the day, that’s a secretarial-level skill, whereas presentation and persuasion and communication [are] CEO-level skills.

And the school’s decision not to be distracted by the fact that today’s world is still more or less a Microsoft Office society:

We spend a lot of time thinking about the future. You [have] to realize just how far ahead you have to think in education… Children who start school today are leaving school in 2025… I don’t feel I can constrain what I do in the school because just because that’s the way the outside world is right now. I want to look at the way the world is going and anticipate that.

And then I read MG Siegler ruminating on Microsoft’s recent (and unprecedented) quarterly loss:

Are the children of today going to grow up to buy Windows-based PCs? Microsoft hopes they will, but all kinds of numbers are already showing the opposite happening. And if you look at even Microsoft’s current, seemingly strong fiscal numbers the correct way, I believe you can see it.

Given: The workforce your kids enter won't be the same one you entered. Your kids' technology won't be constrained by their employers' vendor contracts. How you prepare your kids is up to you.